ATLANTA—The Georgia Board of Regents has approved Professor Emanuela Guano as the inaugural Ackerman Professor in Anthropology in the College of Arts & Sciences at Georgia State University.
Emanuela Guano
The endowed professorship, which sits in the Department of Anthropology, was established with a generous gift from the estate of the late Charles S. Ackerman, the founder of commercial real estate firm Ackerman & Co. as well as the home security firm Ackerman Securities.
Ackerman received a master’s in anthropology from Georgia State where his program included a six-month study abroad experience in which he lived and studied with an indigenous tribe in Costa Rica. The professorship established in his name is designed to support the scholarship of a faculty member in the department.
Guano’s ethnographic research focuses on the processes that are currently transforming postindustrial cities around the world, with a particular attention to aesthetic and cultural consumption and the revitalization of urban space through public art and the production of heritage.
She has carried out research in Jamaica, Argentina and Italy. She has published two books and numerous journal articles and book chapters.
Sponsored by the Wenner Gren Foundation for Anthropological Research, Guano’s current ethnographic project focuses on Genoa’s post-industrial peripheries, and investigates the practices through which residents reclaim their agency in a revitalization process that has often eluded them. The Ackerman Professorship will fund her ethnographic research for three more years and will also support the writing of a new book.
“As the inaugural Ackerman Professor, I am excited about the kind of support that will help me break new ground in anthropology,” Guano said. “Just as importantly, I am truly grateful to the Ackerman family for its patronage of our department at a time when our discipline is more relevant than ever.”
Jennifer Patico, chair of the Department of Anthropology, noted that Guano’s work has been admired and cited by an international audience of scholars of neoliberalism, urbanity, class and inequality, and citizenship.
“We in the Department of Anthropology are thrilled and grateful that the Ackerman Professorship will shine a bright light on her achievements and provide material support for her ongoing ethnographic research and writing, which exemplify Georgia State’s mission to illuminate the problems of global cities,” Patico said.
